July and August tend to be the seasons where summer festivals get kicked into full swing. Much like festivals in any country, the festivities are often accompanied by various stalls selling drinks and snacks. Other stalls can be found offering games that you know are probably rigged, but just can’t help trying.

For one such stall runner, 45-year-old Tsutomu Morikawa, poor price planning led to a date with the police.

According to a police announcement on 28 July, Morikawa was taken into custody for operating a rigged lottery game during a festival in Abeoji Shrine, Nishinari, Osaka. He was charged with defrauding three people of about 14,000 yen (US$142) on the previous day.

▼ Abeoji Shrine

Morikawa sold the chance to pull tickets numbered one to one hundred. If the ticket was numbered 55 or over then it’s a winner of high-end prizes included popular game consoles like PlayStation 3 and Wii U consoles. Lower numbers might’ve landed you a moustache comb if you were lucky. One ticket cost 300 yen ($3) and two cost 500 yen ($5). As you might have already guessed, no tickets over 54 existed to be pulled.

We would have to guess that Morikawa didn’t crunch the numbers quite right though, since the average price of 25,000 yen ($255 for basic PS3 and Wii U models) would be the same as a purchase of 100 of his tickets. And given the ridiculously easy odds he laid out one should be able to pull a big winner in well under that amount.

That’s what one man was thinking when he played on that Saturday. After buying 10,000 yen ($102) worth of tickets and being pretty sure he wasn’t the unluckiest guy on the planet, the victim decided to contact the police.

The following day, police raided the stall at which point Morikawa reportedly admitted to not having any winning tickets. He had also said that he sold about 100,000 yen ($1,020) worth of tickets on the previous day.

The moral of the story is; if you’re going to enter the lucrative field of ripping people off, brush up on your math first. Either that or just don’t rip people off… yeah, that’s probably best.

Source: Yahoo! News (Japanese)
Top Image: Google Maps